Monthly Archives: November 2014

I’ll be honest: since about 2009, I haven’t left the house on Black Friday. Instead, I usually sleep in after a long evening spent eating a big meal and having a few glasses of wine with family members. I do get up and check a few online sales, but I haven’t found anything in a brick-and-mortar store that makes it worthwhile to actually go out there and battle the crowds.

That doesn’t mean I don’t utilize the bargains on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I usually do end up buying an item or two each year based on those sales though they have usually been online buys, but I have a very specific strategy that I use to make this work.

Do you love Thanksgiving? I mean do you really LOVE everything about the holiday, from the delicious food to seeing your crazy relatives? Then you are going to be amazed at what goes into making the holiday what it is. And you thought cooking your turkey was a challenge.

1) Are you ready for a day (or three) of eating?

If you can’t make it through the daylong celebration of food, football and family be thankful that you weren’t around for the first Thanksgiving. That celebration took place in the fall of 1621 in Plymouth Colony between European settlers and the Wampanoag Indians and it lasted three days. Talk about a food coma.

2) What’s in a name?

If you think that your Thanksgiving celebration is something special, chances are it has nothing on the celebration in Turkey Creek, La. That town, which has only 440 residents, is one of four towns in the United States with the word turkey in its name. The others are Turkey, Texas, Turkey, N.C. and Turkey Creek, Ariz.

There are also seven towns named after popular Thanksgiving side dishes. Towns and cities named after cranberries are the most popular. In total, seven townships and cities in the United States are named for cranberries, though most have different spellings.

Email hacking is a problem that won’t be going away any time soon. But if you’re diligent and take the proper precautions, you can significantly minimize the chances someone bad will be able to get into your account. Google wants to help too. The company has a new tool that lets you easily check when and where your account has been accessed over the last month to make sure nothing unusual is happening.

The Devices and Activity Dashboard lists what devices are connected to your Google Account, along with when and where they’ve been accessed. The list stays up to date for the past 28 days. If a new device recently began accessing your account, “New” is stationed in all caps next to the product listing. The device you’re currently using with your Google account is listed at the top

Starting in January 2015, Google’s Chrome browser will block all old-school Netscape Plug-In API NPAPI plugins. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, given that Google started its efforts to remove NPAPI plugins more than a year ago.

Over the last year, Google went from recommending that developers move away from this old architecture to actively blocking almost all NPAPI plugins. There was, however, always a whitelist that allowed some of the most popular NPAPI plugins like Microsoft’s Silverlight, Unity and Google’s own Google Earth plugin to continue to run in the browser. Starting in January, even that’s going away and all of these plugins will be blocked by default.

Victoria’s Secret wants to see what today’s millennials are talking about with a new twist on mobile messaging.

At the same time that practically all millennial-minded marketers are using Snapchat, Line, Kik and every other social and mobile platform out there to get in touch with teens, Victoria’s Secret has rolled out its own chat feature within its Pink shopping app.

The lingerie brand is the first marketer to use a chatting feature from a mobile messaging app called Frankly.

After opening the chat feature, app users can talk about predetermined topics like holiday gifts or school. Because this is Victoria’s Secret and millennials are fickle the public chats are customizable with different shades of pink backgrounds and branded emojis. There’s also the usual crop of smiley face emojis that app users can play with, much like a text message.

Mowing the lawn is a pain. An unkempt yard is a hazard. Solution: Bring in the sheep.

On a four-acre patch of unused industrial land along Cleveland’s Lake Erie shore, a flock of 36 sheep plus one protective llama is being employed to keep the grass short. Chomping away in the fenced-off space all summer long, the sheep kept the lot looking tidy for half the cost of a landscaping crew — $1,500 compared to nearly $4,000.

“There’s a lot of empty land, and not a lot of money to take care of it,” said Michael Fleming, executive director of community development organization St. Clair Superior, which founded the sheep grazing program in 2012 with $8,000 in grant money.

You know how important it is to do what you love. So what do you do when what you love makes you really successful? Do you stay a one-person or one location operation? Of course not. You expand!

Well, it isn’t exactly that easy. Deciding that expanding is a good idea and actually making it happen for your sweet little enterprise is something else entirely. Still, if it’s what you think is best, here are some tips to help you do it.

Look at the Numbers

There’s a difference between doing well and doing well enough to expand. A lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners move too quickly with this. They think that a few months of ending in “the black” means that they are ready to take on the huge expense that is opening another business. Don’t make this mistake! Instead, wait until your business has built up enough of a reserve to keep your current operation afloat for at least a couple of years as well as fund the building, staffing and marketing and running of a new location for the same amount of time–yes, even before you try to talk to a bank about loans.

It’s a good idea to talk to your accountant as soon as you make the decision that you want to grow and expand your location. You can start setting aside funds for expansion. This way you won’t be tempted to spend them building your current location.

Thinner, lighter and more powerful than last year’s model, the iPad Air 2 is a tablet that’s hard to beat. It’s the sleekest tablet on the market, and its 9.7-inch display is beautiful to behold. Plus, the addition of Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner gives it a big security boost. But as a work device, Apple’s flagship iPad still has some noteworthy shortcomings — especially with so many great Windows-powered slates to choose from. That bottom line is that the iPad Air 2 is a very good productivity device, but it’s far from perfect.

Certain apps — from Mailbox to LinkedIn — are a given for entrepreneurs on the go. But with thousands of apps out there, it’s easy to overlook something that could make your life easier or, in some cases, just brighten your day.

With that in mind, we asked nine founders from YEC the following:

Q: What relatively unknown app do you open first thing in the morning to help you start your workday?

1. Slacker Radio

Slacker streams ABC News and is updated every 30 minutes to an hour. I love it; I’ve been using it to listen to news in the morning while getting ready and while walking or taking the bus to the office. NPR One is a new contender, but I still feel Slacker’s stream is more news than audio documentary or interview. – Chuck Reynolds, Levers